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Book chronicles Princeton’s rise from small college to intellectual powerhouse

By Jennifer Greenstein Altmann

James Axtell will discuss “The Making of Princeton University” at 2 p.m.
Friday, June 2, at the University Store.

Princeeton NJ — When Woodrow Wilson took over the presidency of Princeton
University in 1902, the college was a small institution with about 1,300
students and modest ambitions. Wilson’s plan for transforming the University —
by radically upgrading the faculty, the curriculum and the graduate school —
laid the groundwork for Princeton to become one of the nation’s pre-eminent
universities.

The story of that transformation is told in “The Making of
Princeton University: From Woodrow Wilson to the Present,” published this spring
by Princeton University Press. The author, James Axtell, is the Kenan Professor
of Humanities at the College of William and Mary.

Axtell recently spoke about what made Wilson such a pivotal figure
in Princeton’s history and the significance of Princeton’s relatively small
size.

You graduated from Yale and Cambridge. Why write a book about
Princeton?

For a short research paper in junior-year high-school English, I
chose — for reasons that defy explanation — Woodrow Wilson as president of
Princeton. I had no personal interest in Princeton, but I think I was intrigued
by the notion of a future U.S. president apprenticing as a college professor
and president. A photo in one of my sources of Wilson walking to his last
Commencement in cap and gown, head down, looking defeated, apparently went deep
into my subconscious. Some 35 years later, in some random volumes of the
Princeton Alumni Weekly that I purchased at a Firestone Library sale en route
to a Maine vacation, I saw the picture again and realized that it was something
I wanted to explore and explain. After eight books on colonial Indian-European
relations and the end of a six-year involvement in the Columbus Quincentenary,
I decided to return to my first love, the history of higher education, and to
write a new kind of college history.

By then I had also become intrigued by Princeton’s growing
ascendance in the academic pecking order, due largely to Bill Bowen’s and
Harold Shapiro’s forceful building of the faculty in numbers and intellectual
power. I wondered what, if any, connection existed between Wilson’s promising
start and Princeton’s recent success.

“The Making of Princeton University: From Woodrow Wilson to the
Present,” published this spring by Princeton University Press.

How does your book differ from other college histories?

Most college histories make pretty dull reading because they’re
terribly eclectic in content and don’t distinguish the primary, interesting
topics from the secondary or tertiary. The primary focus of any college or
university is — or should be — the educational process. Everything else — administrators, architecture, fund raising,
stadiums, trustees and policy-making — exists to support the educational
encounter between students and faculty, largely in the curriculum, and between
the students themselves, largely in the extracurriculum and pervasive student
culture. So that’s my organizing principle, rather than presidential regimes.
The major topics I chose were the six educational features of any great
university, particularly Princeton: faculty, students, graduate program,
library and labs, art museum and university press.

I also bring to the study of Princeton’s distinctive culture my
anthropological background in ethnohistory. In a sense, I treat the strange
Tiger tribe, particularly its student moiety, as I would the cultural
strangeness of the 17th-century Iroquois or 18th-century Moravians. I simply
asked elemental questions and searched for the primary sources to answer them.
Like an anthropologist doing fieldwork, I became a “participant-observer” in
frequent research trips to Princeton. Obviously, I knew a great deal
about universities like Princeton, but I couldn’t assume that I
knew what made it distinctive and different from the others I had
known. I especially couldn’t assume that I knew much about it
historically. So I had to do my homework, as I would for any
other book.

What was your research process like?

I began at both ends of the chronology. I bought the first 22
volumes of the Princeton edition of “The Papers of Woodrow Wilson” and the
volumes from 1939 of the Princeton Alumni Weekly. Of the latter I made an
extensive topical index, so I could retrieve information on almost any topic in
Princeton’s past. I read the transcripts of extensive interviews conducted by
two of Wilson’s biographers in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s with virtually all of
the living people who knew Wilson. Then in the archives in Mudd Library I
filled in the gaps. I enjoyed a Friends of the Library summer fellowship in
2000 to pursue that research.

I conducted few formal interviews, but I did talk to a lot of folks
— students, faculty and administrators, librarians and art museum staff,
Princeton University Press editors and directors — often to locate the best
documentary sources and to be alerted to interpretive pitfalls to avoid in
trying to understand Princeton’s special culture. I was fortunate because both
PAW and University: A Princeton Quarterly, a wonderfully informative magazine
edited by William McCleery in the 1960s and ’70s, contain numerous interviews
with and profiles of key faculty and administrators, as does The Daily
Princetonian.

I did send e-mail questionnaires to all graduate school alumni, the
art and archaeology faculty, and several current and former staff members of
the Princeton University Press, which proved very useful. And if I had further
questions, I simply e-mailed former presidents, current faculty and staff for
guidance and information. Everyone was terribly accommodating, which I found to
be one of Princeton’s distinctive features: a collegial administration and
faculty that put education and research, even an outsider’s, at the forefront.

What made Wilson such a pivotal figure in Princeton’s history?

He was the architect of Princeton as a modern university;
his blueprint is still being followed in its essential lines. In eight
years he reformed and rationalized the curriculum, improved and enlarged
the faculty by 50 percent, and adjusted governance to fit the new
realities. He confirmed Princeton’s penchant for Collegiate Gothic. Most
of all, he established a realistic and distinctive long-term goal for
Princeton: to be selective in what it attempts, but to be
absolutely first-rate in all it does. This selective excellence
meant that size was not important, only quality. And by quality he meant
primarily intellectual quality. He also put a premium on the liberal
arts and sciences, and promoted only graduate and professional studies
that emphasized those fundamental strengths. As the most popular
undergraduate teacher in his day, he continued to give the
undergraduates precedence in the University.

He did all this with a combination of uncommon eloquence, personal
charm — especially when recruiting faculty members — clear vision born of
spiritual conviction and intellectual passion, and great energy. Nevertheless,
he failed to curb the power of the eating clubs, to build “democratic”
residential quads for all four classes, and to place the new Graduate College
in the heart of the campus, where graduate and undergraduate life and study
would form an “organic” whole, partly because of some health problems that
temporarily affected his personality and judgment, partly because of some rough
alumni, trustee and decanal politics.

What were the most surprising things you found?

How apt and eloquent Wilson’s educational vision was, and how
readily the University continued to adopt his blueprint and to adapt it to its
changing needs. At the same time, how reviled he was by some of his powerful
alumni and trustee opponents, who prevented the University from honoring him
until after World War II, when President Dodds and, later, President Goheen
rehabilitated his reputation locally and nationally. No statue of him nor any
building was named for him while those trustees remained on the board. So deep
was their animosity that when two of Wilson’s admirers offered to build a new
library in the 1930s — which Princeton had badly needed for at least 20 years —
they forced the board to reject the offer because it would have carried his
name.

I was also surprised to learn what a math and science powerhouse
Princeton was as early as the late 1920s. This was one of the reasons the
Institute for Advanced Study was founded in Princeton, where it shared
University facilities until its own could be built nearby. It was not by chance
that in 1933 Albert Einstein was recruited by the institute, whose early
fellows shared offices with the math department.

How was the decision to admit women made and has it improved
overall academic performance?

The tenuous late 19th-century precedent of Evelyn College for Women
on Nassau Street was all but forgotten by the late 1960s when President Goheen,
the faculty and the trustees moved Princeton toward coeducation. At first
Goheen, the father of four daughters and one son, entertained the notion of
moving Sarah Lawrence to the opposite side of Lake Carnegie as a coordinate
college, but that was a total mismatch and too expensive and went nowhere. He
had come to the realization that Princeton could no longer ignore the education
of one-half of the nation’s potential leaders and the full human education of
the other half.

When Yale began to move in a similar direction at the same time in
1969, Goheen and the trustees threw open the doors to women, much to the
delight of the male student body. Since the faculty was overwhelmingly in
favor, only elements of the alumni had to be persuaded. Princeton women not
only brought higher academic credentials and challenging new perspectives,
their athletic prowess and team successes soon won the hearts of die-hard
alums.

What is the library’s importance?

Princeton’s libraries were small, cramped and inadequate until
Firestone was built in 1948. Firestone was very carefully planned over two
decades to accommodate Princeton’s distinctive educational philosophy. Based
partly on the experience of the art and archaeology department with the
world-class Marquand Art Library, Firestone was designed to put student reading
and work areas and faculty studies in the midst of appropriate subject
collections in the stacks. The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
and the large comprehensive collection in general were meant to serve both
faculty and student researchers, particularly senior-thesis writers. When
Firestone opened, it was the largest open-stack university library in the
country. It still serves its original purposes extremely well because it was
built in adaptable standard-sized modules and can be expanded in several
directions underground, as it has been on three occasions.

What is the significance of Princeton’s relatively small size and
its exceptionally low student-faculty ratio?

Princeton has all the advantages of a larger research university
and of a smaller liberal arts college rolled into one. It is the poster child
of the “collegiate university” or, as former Dean of the Faculty J. Douglas
Brown liked to call it, the “liberal university.” Its 5-to-1 student-faculty
ratio — one of the lowest in America — makes possible numerous small-group
learning experiences, as does the senior thesis, Princeton’s distinctive
curricular requirement. Because Princeton expects all faculty to teach as well
as to research, and all faculty teach both graduate and undergraduate courses
and supervise both theses and dissertations, Princeton professors have a tough
job. But they perform better at all levels — to judge by student and other
evaluations — because they teach both the least and the most advanced students
regularly and in tandem.